Campaign finance experts worry that super PACs will further open the floodgates to corporate money in politics, allowing wealthy individuals or corporations to have an even bigger voice in the political process.
"The worst-case scenario is [super PACs] will continue to magnify the political power of a smaller group of very-well-off individuals or corporations, and continue to diminish the relative power of any one individual American," says Melody Crowder-Meyer, a political scientist at the University of the South, in Sewanee, Tenn.
Super PACs "make it more difficult for outsider candidates not already established with insiders and fundraisers ... to get their voice heard through all of this superspending that more well-connected candidates will have.... If they don't have multimillionaires willing to spend money on getting their message out, it's going to be a lot harder for them" to be heard.
Professor Crowder-Meyer holds out some hope, however, that super PACs could also have a positive impact. "One good thing that can come from this: Increased advertising gets more people to see information about campaigns that increase interest in the political system," she says. "We have fairly low voter participation. The influence of super PACs may be that they get more people to pay attention to an election."
